I am working on developing a new website for my company that involves agent pages (each agent has their own microsite), and I am looking for an easier way to handle all 600 agent pages.

I have found what I am looking for, but I have no idea what to look for in building this platform.

When the user enters the website, it is designed to display the information of the company, such as phone number. When the user selects a specific agent (or loan officer in this case), it directs them to the loan offers page, such as website.com/joesmith/. The interesting thing about this platform is that it then changes all the phone numbers listed on the page, as well as the "home" button link, so that it always recognizes that the user is linked with Joe Smith.

If the user selects a link in the navigation, the /joesmith/ portion of the URL is not present (suggesting that they only have one "about" page that changes based on cookies), but if they then select the home button, it directs them back to Joe Smith's home page, rather than the companies home page.

It seems to store a cookie, or data point when the user enters an agent's page, and then changes the rest of the site to the information that needs to be presented. I know how I could build a few of the pieces, but I don't quite understand how to store the data entered (who the agent is), and then display the proper information.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of how I can accomplish this? It would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

05-24-2013, 01:38 AM

noreplace

Hi,
I took a quick look at the website you mentioned, they do use a cookie to save user's selection. If you check the source code you will see that they use a third party analytic services to track users, sales etc...
Each agent's page has a cookie associates to their account, Once you click on "Change Loan Officer" menu located at the bottom right it actually deletes the cookie.
If you're familiar with building mobile websites it's like the same process by putting a link at the bottom of the mobile page and let users select the desktop version of the website if they want. It's pretty straight forward
As you didn't mention which platform(CMS, php framework...) you are using to accomplish your goals, you can proceed the same way as they do:
Create predefined cookies for each agent based on an account number (600 cookies :D)
Insert in the head section of each agent's page a script that will place the cookie on the user's browser
Redirect user to agent's page based on cookies
Create a link to remove cookies so that user can go to the main site

If you know Javascript, you will be able to accomplish this task.
Hope these info help you a little bit.